Now that linux-dsp has moved and the new company is doing vst’s, is there anything special I need to do to get these working?
Please note, I’m not particularly interested in windows VST’s, just getting the native linux ones working.
cheers
Allan
The binary of A3 from ardour.org (should) support linuxVST
If you compile it from source it may be necessary to enable it (it was enabled by default, then the default config got screwed up in the git build and disabled it by default - I hope this was not deliberate - then, I believe - and hope - it got reverted, but the end result is that I have no idea if it is or isn’t enabled or not if you build it from the current source - or if you use / build anything your distribution may or may not install).
As for where to put the VSTs, when I coded the original support for linuxVST I had to choose somewhere which wasn’t /usr/lib/vst as this was already used if you compiled in Windows VST support.
There is (or was) an environment variable which you could set to a different path (but again I had to choose an environment variable which wasn’t VST_PATH because I think this was already used for Windows VSTs, and I understand it has been changed several times since so I could not tell you what it now is).
Added to this I’m given to understand that FalkTX created a custom fork of A3 which redefined either or both of these paths and quite possibly hardcoded them to suit KXStudio.
There have been many improvements to linux VST support since I originally added the basic code, including scanning plugins in an external process (which was something I had anticipated in the original design, but lacked the time to implement).
Unfortuately, in the way that open projects generally do, it has also spawned several different and slightly incompatible incarnations along the way, which has degraded the ‘user experience’ a little.
My advice (as always) would be to use the official A3 binary from ardour.org - and if VST support is lacking in that, mercilessly harass the ardour devs by every means possible until they switch it back on again… 
On a related note, if/when we implement VST support on OSX, a session with LinuxDSP’s plugins could be shared from mac to win to linux, which would be nice.
@BenLoftis: VST support in A3 / Mixbus (on all platforms) would be great, for plug-in support generally - I’m sure it would also benefit a great many other developers (and users). In common with most other developers I also have AudioUnit versions for Mac in addition to VST, so you can use them in Mixbus for OS X, but obviously, at present that doesn’t provide such seamless cross-platform session compatibility.
Several DAWs have managed to do cross-platform session compatibility even though this involves AU format plugins on OS X and VST on Windows. I currently don’t have any idea how they do it.
wow… thanks everybody…
I’m currently using kxstudio, but plan to go back to using Gentoo . as gentoo studio … so all this information is good…